Fundamentals of Feeding the Cow

Jan 28, 2025

This four-session webinar series is focused on understanding how the cow’s nutrient requirements change throughout the year and how to cost-effectively meet a cow's needs with grazed or harvested feed. Over 100 participants took the course in 2024 and rated it as above average or one of the best educational opportunities available to them.

One participant commented, “I really liked that it is Zoom-based. It’s hard to get away to attend conferences. I appreciated the 'real life' examples discussed. It made the material easier to apply to our own scenarios. I will absolutely do another program if you offer one! The sessions were a good length, long enough to get though material but not so long as to lose interest. Thank you so much for providing resources we can continue to use in the future after the sessions are over!”

Topics to be covered include:
• What impacts a cow's nutrient requirements and how do they change throughout the year?
• How do you read and understand a feed test analysis as well as a feed tag? What do the numbers mean?
• When comparing feed options, which is the best buy when all things are considered?
• What are things to consider when developing a year-round feeding plan?

The cost of the course is $65 and includes a notebook of Nebraska Extension resources. The course is limited to 40 participants. A computer and internet connection will be needed to participate in the webinar series.

For questions about the webinar series, please contact Aaron Berger, Nebraska Extension Educator, at 308-235-3122 or aberger2@unl.edu. Follow us on Facebook or sign up for the BeefWatch e-newsletter for the latest information and events from UNL Beef.

Source : unl.edu

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators